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Being Jewish in 2025: How the Light Gets In
Leonard Cohen in concert in 2008. Photo: Wikipedia.
Several years ago, I took my son — then barely a year old — to the Jewish Museum on the Upper East Side of New York to see the exhibition Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything.
I remember stopping outside the museum, his stroller facing a large poster of Cohen’s face. The words of his lyric stretched across it: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” My son couldn’t read, of course, but he stared at that image intently, as if trying to make sense of what all the grown-ups were looking for. It was a tender, ordinary afternoon in New York; a father and child visiting an exhibit, a small act of continuity in a busy city.
I didn’t know, then, how much those words would matter. I didn’t know we would soon live through a pandemic that would empty museums, synagogues, and schools; that we would witness October 7 and the eruption of antisemitism across campuses and public life; or that our civic order itself would begin to feel so fractured. “A crack in everything” turned out not to be metaphorical. It became the condition of our world.
This fall, I returned to the Jewish Museum with that same son, now old enough to read and to ask questions. The museum has been newly curated, and for the first time in years, it feels unmistakably Jewish — rooted, confident, and proud of its inheritance. Where the earlier exhibit and show universalized Cohen’s lyric into a cultural meditation, the new curation situates Jewish endurance at its center. On the fourth floor, in large letters on the wall, the lyric reappears: “There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
Standing there with my son, I realized how the meaning had changed, not in the words, but in us.
Cohen wrote these words as part of his song, “Anthem,” most likely as a meditation on imperfection and redemption. Its refrain — “Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering” — rejects the false purity of utopianism. It is a deeply Jewish idea: the world is broken, and we are called to repair it, not replace it. The crack is not a flaw to be sealed over; it is the aperture through which holiness enters.
In the years since COVID-19 and October 7, I have found myself returning to this idea again and again. We have endured illness, isolation, and war; the rise of antisemitism on campuses and in the streets; and a moral confusion that has left many young Jews disoriented. In all of it, Cohen’s words have felt like instruction, not sentiment. They remind us that despair is easy but empty, and that to be Jewish is to choose life even in the face of fracture.
When the Jewish Museum chose to display this line so prominently, it was making a quiet but profound statement: that Jewish art, faith, and memory are not defined by victimhood or perfectionism, but by resilience. The museum, like Cohen’s song, acknowledges the world’s cracks and then insists that light can still enter through them.
The museum itself embodies this renewal. By firmly embracing its Jewish identity, the museum has become what it was meant to be: a cultural and spiritual home, not merely a secular art space with Jewish footnotes.
Hebrew inscriptions are allowed to stand proudly, ritual objects are presented as living tools rather than anthropological artifacts, and modern works converse openly with ancient forms. It situates Jewish creativity not as a curiosity within modernity but as a moral partner to it.
That, too, echoes Cohen. His art was never about erasing tension between the sacred and the profane, but holding it. His Judaism was both universal and particular, both Montreal and Jerusalem, both psalm and protest.
When we reached the upper gallery, my son stopped before a remarkable Torah scroll, preserved under glass. The scroll, with its Hebrew letters still dark and deliberate, was said to have been desecrated by British soldiers in 1776, when the New York congregation fled the city with General Washington’s retreating troops. It now sits restored and revered, the centerpiece of the museum’s reimagined space. I watched my son peer into the glass, his reflection hovering over the ancient words. It was as if he were seeing the story of endurance itself: the unbroken chain of reading, repair, and renewal that defines Jewish life. Behind him, an ornate ark shimmered with gold and blue, a reminder that even in exile, beauty and faith persist.
In that moment, Cohen’s line — “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”- – felt literal. The glass case reflected both fragility and illumination. A text once defiled now stands at the center of a museum reborn. My son’s gaze met that light, and I thought: this is how transmission happens; not through lectures or manifestos, but through wonder, through seeing something both broken and whole.
There is also a civic lesson here. Cohen’s “crack in everything” is really about how communities respond to brokenness. Liberal democracy, too, depends on the belief that imperfection is not fatal — that disagreement and difference can coexist with shared purpose.
In today’s cultural climate, that belief is under strain.
But the Jewish tradition — and the American civic tradition — teach the opposite. They teach that truth and light emerge through argument, through the wrestling Jacob undertakes with the angel, through the contestation of the prophets and the debates of the Talmud.
“Ring the bells that still can ring,” Cohen says — meaning, use what still works, and keep faith with what remains, even when it is partial or cracked. Civic renewal depends on that same spirit. The Jewish Museum’s new presentation is an act of such faith. It does not paper over pain, nor does it instrumentalize suffering. It invites viewers — Jewish and not — to see continuity amid rupture. And in doing so, it offers a civic model: that communities can be honest about their wounds without surrendering their worth.
This lesson feels especially urgent after October 7. The massacre in Israel and the subsequent eruption of antisemitism across the West have revealed just how fragile moral clarity has become. Many institutions that speak endlessly of justice have struggled, or refused, to name evil when it targeted Jews. The cracks in our civic and moral order were exposed. And yet, even here, light can enter.
In my discussions over the years with the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, he often reminded me of a truth at the heart of our tradition: Our task is not to perfect the world but to begin the work, knowing it will never be complete. That sentiment has never felt more relevant.
Leaving the museum that afternoon, my son looked up at the inscription one last time. “That’s a good idea,” he said, in the simple way children speak when they sense something true. It was a moment of grace; a reminder that memory, art, and faith can transmit strength even across generations that know only fragments of what came before. Someday he may bring his own child here and look again into that same glass, seeing both the cracks and the light and know they belong to him.
Cohen’s lyric is not only a song; it is a theology of hope. The Jewish Museum’s decision to foreground it is an affirmation that Jewish culture remains, at its core, a beacon of light amid brokenness. And that lesson is one America needs desperately right now: that cracks are not endings but invitations — inspirations to rebuild, to renew, and to let the light in.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Gene Shalit, a mensch with a personality as big as his mustache, turns 100
The television entertainment personality Gene Shalit, who celebrated his centenary on March 25, semaphored a Jewish appearance for decades to viewers of NBC’s early morning gabfest The Today Show.
With his Jew-fro hairstyle that fascinated celebrity interviewees and his abundant mustache that outdid Groucho Marx’s mere greasepaint simulacrum, Shalit was one of a kind. Born in New York City in 1926, he clearly aimed to be recognizable even through half-opened bleary eyes of half-asleep viewers. And audible too. Shalit’s precise pronunciation, always at a vigorous decibel level, sought to be comprehensible even during voiceovers. The Canadian comedian Eugene Levy, transfixed by this persona, imitated him on SCTV roaring at high decibel levels.
In one skit, Levy embodied Shalit with haimish affection, hawking a remedy for a migraine presumably caused by his own bellowing. In another, Levy spoofed Hollywood celebrities who were notorious fressers at local restaurants, including the American Jewish actress Shelley Winters (born Shirley Schrift). In still another lampoon, Levy-as-Shalit danced and also kibitzed with the late Catherine O’Hara as the Jewish gossip columnist Rona Barrett (born Burstein).
Shalit apparently kvelled at the notion that he was prominent enough in media culture to be affectionately kidded like other Jewish noteworthies Levy imitated, including Howard Cosell, Henry Kissinger, Menachem Begin, Milton Berle, Judd Hirsch, Jack Carter, James Caan, Lorne Greene, Norman Mailer and Neil Sedaka.
Years later, Levy recalled that when the SCTV comedy troupe was invited to appear on The Today Show, before the segment was filmed, chairs were arranged so that Catherine O’Hara was seated next to Shalit. Suddenly Shalit exclaimed: “Wait a minute, shouldn’t the person who [imitates] me be sitting beside me?” Another Jewish comedian, Jon Lovitz, would likewise attempt to imitate Shalit on Saturday Night Live, but without the zest of Levy’s indelible incarnation.
Shalit once told showbiz reporter Eileen Prose that at first, his looks limited him to radio jobs in more conventional times for TV talent. By the more liberated late 1960s, when long hair and a hirsute upper lip were more common, he was hired as quasi-permanent house Jew on The Today Show. Although his mustache fit the counterculture in the mode of Jewish activist Jerry Rubin’s, Shalit as an aspiring journalist may have grown his facial hair more in tribute to earlier literati like the playwright William Saroyan or the eminent humorist Mark Twain.
At times, Shalit’s appearance could be clown-like or cartoonish, so it was natural that characters inspired by him would appear on animated series such as SpongeBob SquarePants and Family Guy as well as The Muppet Show.
Famous interviewees like Peter Sellers were plainly at ease with Shalit’s persona. A conversation filmed shortly before Sellers’ untimely death was cordial, with the sometimes tetchy actor on his best behavior, acknowledging Shalit as a fellow entertainer. And with Mel Brooks in 1987, Shalit looked to be in paradise.
A warm-hearted empathizer and enthusiast, Shalit was more suited to promoting films than criticizing them. In 1989, a tzimmes occurred when a memo drafted by Bryant Gumbel, a Today Show colleague, deemed Shalit a “specialist in gushing over actors and directors” and added that Shalit’s interviews “aren’t very good.” To his credit, Shalit minimized the controversy, telling The Los Angeles Times that Gumbel’s disses were “not big whacks.”
“Listen, I’ve been interviewing people on the show for 17 years,” Shalit said. “I must be doing something right.”
Part of his inspiration was a sincere appreciation for humor, Jewish and otherwise. His 1987 anthology, Laughing Matters featured contributions by Jewish wits such as Dorothy Parker, S. J. Perelman, Woody Allen, Fran Lebowitz, Samuel Hoffenstein, Philip Roth, Mel Brooks, George S. Kaufman, Milt Gross, Arthur Kober, Leo Rosten, Allan Sherman, Max Shulman, Calvin Trillin, Rube Goldberg, Sam Gross, Roz Chast, B. Kliban, Robert Mankoff, J. B. Handelsman, Jules Feiffer and George Burns. The volume was dedicated to, among others, the Jewish screenwriter Samson Raphaelson, who was Shalit’s instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
His visceral reaction to Jewish parody was such that during one commuter train ride, Shalit admitted in a preface, Perelman’s story “No Starch in the Dhoti, S’il Vous Plait” caused a conductor to lean down with concern, stating: “A passenger says you’re crying.” To which Shalit retorted, choking and rubbing away tears: “I’m laughing.”
The subliminal message of Shalit’s book was that without Jews, America would have distinctly fewer tears of laughter. And he regretted not being able to include funny Jews like Jack Benny and Ed Wynn whose performances could not be transferred to the printed page.
Shalit also reviewed books for years. Sticking firmly to the content of cultural products with a few brief hints of value judgment, Shalit seemed to have neither the time nor presumably the inclination to subject new items to analysis of Freudian intensity. He clearly preferred boosting things to panning them, and when a film displeased Shalit, he could be uncomfortable saying so.
One occasion when Shalit raised hackles was his response on The Today Show to the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain. Shalit described one of the gay characters as a “sexual predator.” The LGBTQ media group GLAAD objected to Shalit’s characterization as a homophobic stereotype. Shalit’s son Peter wrote an open letter to GLAAD, identifying himself as a gay physician with a Seattle practice helping the gay community. Peter Shalit admitted that his father “did not get” the film in question, but was “not a homophobe.” He might have added that his father had even included an excerpt from Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy in the aforementioned humor collection.
Shalit followed up with his own apology, stating in a mensch-like way that he did not intend to cast “aspersions on anyone in the gay community or on the community itself.” When Shalit finally retired from broadcasting at age 84, with the Yiddish-inflected declaration: “It’s enough, already,” he left behind admiring viewers and decades of bonhomie as one of morning television’s most genial protagonists.
Mazel tov, Gene Shalit. Biz hundert un tsvantsik (May you live until 120)!
The post Gene Shalit, a mensch with a personality as big as his mustache, turns 100 appeared first on The Forward.
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How a song about the food chain became a Seder mainstay
I’m almost positive I heard about the old lady who swallowed a fly before the father who bought a goat for two zuzim.
This occurred to me a few years ago while riding in my sister’s minivan. My niece was in her car seat fidgeting with a toy that plays a catalogue of public domain children’s songs. But unlike the version I’d grown up hearing, where the old lady’s ravenous habit of devouring ever-larger animals is met with the prognostic shrug of “perhaps she’ll die,” the refrain was changed to the more kid-friendly “oh me oh my.”
The Seder tune “Chad Gadya,” which involves a quite similar conceit, has no such timidity when it comes to the ravages of death.
Jack Black once described it as the “original heavy metal song” for the way it progresses along the chain of life from a little goat bought for two zuzim, to the cat who ate the goat, to the dog who bit the cat, all the way up to the angel of death. (“Very Black Sabbath.”)
It is pretty metal — in a kosher Kidz Bop, tot Shabbat kinda way. But why we sing it should, in Jewish circles, be as popular a seasonal question as what a bunny with a clutch of eggs has to do with Jesus’ resurrection. (Some Haggadot explain the greater significance of “Chad Gadya;” my Maxwell House does not.)
Dating the song or rooting out its precise origins is not easy.
As historian Henry Abramson wrote, scholars have noted the song’s similarities to a late Medieval German folk rhyme. While the fact that it is mostly in Aramaic, not the vernacular in Europe in the Middle Ages, suggests an earlier provenance, it is missing from extant Sephardic and Yemenite Haggadot, where one would expect to find texts originating in the language, and the Aramaic itself has many errors.
Abramson reasons that, given the surviving written versions, it was likely adapted sometime in the 14th century from a German children’s rhyme called “The Foreman that Sent Jockel Out,” about an idler named Jockel who a foreman tries to rouse to fieldwork with an escalating series of messengers, ending with a hangman. (Abramson notes the original is characterized by “some Teutonic weirdness,” like a witch sent to subdue a vulture.)
“Chad Gadya” belongs, like its Seder companion “Echad Mi Yodea,” to a genre called “cumulative song,” where verses build with new information a la “12 Days of Christmas.” But “Chad Gadya” stands out for its strangeness and its more oblique message.
Abramson and others see the goat, small and vulnerable, standing in for the Jewish people, and the ensuing parade of antagonists corresponding to historical enemies (Assyrians, Babylonians) and periods of time (Exodus, various conquests), ending with redemption in the Messianic age when the Holy One smites death.
As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote in a commentary for his Haggadah, the song “teaches the great truth of Jewish hope: that though many nations (symbolized by the cat, the dog, and so on) attacked Israel (the goat), each in turn has vanished into oblivion.”
That this truth is conveyed in song, with much banging on the table or animal noises, speaks to the centrality of children in the Passover Seder. And, some think, its inclusion serves a practical purpose: keeping the kids awake through the last leg of a long ritual meal.
My own interpretation is admittedly less lofty. I don’t think of Israel’s tribulations. I do think of the abundance of stray cats in Jerusalem, said to have originated during the British mandate when the city had a rat problem.
And, in the years since my own days as designated Four Questions asker, I’ve been reading “Chad Gadya” into non-Jewish contexts. “The White Cat,” off of Mitski’s new album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, contains a lyric that recalls the song, only altered to be a metaphor for the predations of capitalism.
In it, the speaker says she must work to pay for the cat’s house and “for the bugs who drink my blood/and the birds who eat those bugs/so that white cat can kill the birds.”
These cycles speak across cultures and time because they represent a fundamental rule of nature: There’s always a bigger fish (or cat or dog or stick).
To erase death from the equation, like my niece’s toy does with that hapless, insect-ingesting pensioner, is a concession to today’s sensitivities. That’s not to say “The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” represents anything more homiletic than a choking hazard warning, but in the case of “Chad Gadya,” death is the story, and an end to death is the hope.
“The Haggadah ends with the death of death in eternal life,” Rabbi Sacks concluded his drash on the song, which ends when God strikes down the Angel of Death. “A fitting end for the story of a people dedicated to Moshe’s great command, ‘Choose life.’”
I know it’s a principle of faith all over the Haggadah, but I’m more agnostic as to that Messianic promise and maybe more in the camp of our old lady. My understanding of Jewishness, which accords with Moshe’s command, says life is best lived knowing that — perhaps — we’ll die.
The post How a song about the food chain became a Seder mainstay appeared first on The Forward.
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Katz: ‘Israel’s Goal in Lebanon is to Disarm Hezbollah’
Then-Israeli transportation minister Israel Katz attends the cabinet meeting at the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, Feb. 17, 2019. Katz currently serves as the foreign minister. Photo: Sebastian Scheiner/Pool via REUTERS
i24 News – Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz held a situation assessment Friday with senior military and defense officials, reiterating that the country’s policy in Lebanon remains focused on disarming Hezbollah by military and political means. Katz emphasized that the goal applies “regardless of the Iran issue” and pledged continued protection for Israeli northern communities.
Katz said the Israel Defense Forces are completing ground maneuvers up to the anti-tank line to prevent direct threats to border towns. He outlined plans to demolish houses in villages near the border that serve as Hezbollah outposts, citing previous operations in Rafah and Khan Yunis in Gaza as models.
The Defense Minister added that the IDF will maintain security control over the Litani area and that the return of 600,000 residents of southern Lebanon who had evacuated north will not be permitted until northern communities’ safety is ensured. Katz also reaffirmed that the IDF will continue targeting Hezbollah leaders and operatives across Lebanon, noting that 1,000 terrorists have already been eliminated since the start of the current campaign.
“We promised security to the northern towns, and that is exactly what we will do,” Katz said. He further warned that the IDF will act decisively against rocket fire from Lebanon, stating that Hezbollah “will pay heavy prices.”